And Keep Moving On: The Virginia Campaign, May-June 1864

Mark Grimsley's volume in the "Great Campaigns of the Civil War" series covers the first six weeks or so of military operations in Virginia in the spring of 1864. Grimsley's purpose is to give readers an account of the operations as the opposing commanders—Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant—understood them at the time.

To keep Rebel strength divided, Grant launched several offensives against Confederate Virginia in the hope that he would be able to destroy his major adversary—Lee's army. Several of these offensives took place in the Shenandoah Valley in western Virginia. Owing both to the brilliant response of Major General John C. Breckinridge, commanding Southern forces in the Valley, and to poor Union generalship, they all failed. Meanwhile, in southeastern Virginia, Confederates under General P. G. T. Beauregard managed to defeat the Yankee forces sent up the James River toward the Richmond-Petersburg area. These victories enabled the Confederates to reinforce their principal army for the contest with Grant.

Grimsley devotes the bulk of his study to the main bout: the great clash between Lee and Grant that involved the Battles of The Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House, operations along the North Anna River, and the Battle of Cold Harbor. The account relates tactical events (usually) down to the division level and includes a discussion of how the troops on both sides lived during the campaign. The book features little that is new, but such is not the purpose of the series, which is designed to summarize current thinking about Civil War campaigns and to evaluate their significance for the war as a whole.

Arguably the most interesting part of the volume comes in the last pages of text when Grimsley presents a discussion of how in postwar years the campaign came to be a major part of the "Myth of the Lost Cause." White Southerners created the myth to help assuage the pain of defeat and to justify their conduct as well as to present themselves as noble in peace and war. Thus they portrayed the great 1864 struggle in Virginia as one in which Lee and his paladins soundly whipped Grant. The Union commander, too dumb to understand that he had been defeated, simply called up more reinforcements and kept moving on until, by sheer weight of numbers, he ground the gallant Confederates down to defeat.

A full evaluation of this book must await publication of the next volume in the series. Readers who want a good introduction to or an overview of the early weeks of the 1864 operations in Virginia (the "Overland Campaign") will find this volume more than adequate. Those who desire more tactical details should turn to the works of Gordon C. Rhea, Noah Andre Trudeau, and others.